An arcade machine and a ipod

[kenshen]

so i compiled mame with highscore diff and have a valid hi folder i was wondering is it possible to display Mame high scores on an ipod touch? And second question if i could connect my ipod to my computer could i make my ipod act like a memory card where it detects saves for each system on my ipod and loads those saves? I was thinking a few batch files to sync the saves from a ipod to a computer and back would that be possible? 

[kenshen]

Bump?

[headkaze]

The way I would do this would be to write a PC application that communicates with an app running on an iPod using wifi. The PC app would run HiToText to read the hi data and send it to the iPod using something like UDP. The iPod app then displays the scores in a UITableView.

[-rich-]

Not quite sure what your after, but it is certainly possible to write an ios app to do what want as headkaze said. We use CommandFusion at work to quickly spin up user interfaces and it could certainly be used for something like your suggesting. The per device licence doesn't scale very well but its a much easier entry point than leaning to code an ios app (doublely so if you don't own a mac).

Again, as headkaze suggested, communicating over a network is a more effective way of getting the data to the app than plugging in.

rich

[kenshen]

so i dont code in ios can some one who knows ios help?

[kenshen]

Bump again?

[-rich-]

Well if you want to learn to code then joining the apple developers program is the first step.

If you don't want to go down that path then I'd suggest something like Command Fusion - check out there web page to get an idea.

I develop for iPhone and Command Fusion so I'm happy to help - would prefer to use CF for this though, quicker. Alternatively you could throw it into a web server and view that on anything - not much of a web coder though.

I'm not terribly familiar with the working of MAME (yet) so not 100% sure of how to get the data to the app to display but its running on a PC so how hard could that be? I live in Linux and Mac land for the most part, no real experience coding for Windows other than at the command line. I'm thinking a little python script that could read the hi scores and make them available as a JSON feed (or HTML). The App would read the values in and keep then until it could refresh so it would work on or offline.

I'll have a look at the diff you mentioned and the format of the hi scores so I can get a better idea of whats needed.

rich

[kenshen]

Thanks and getting the diff which is at the top of this forum I think? Is a simple patch and recompile of name literally took me moments to get started And I'll probably go the cf route so help needed there but thx for the help.

[headkaze]

I could also code this, as I'm an iOS, Mac and PC developer, but I'm not sure if it would be worth the time invested (sorry).

If I did write it I would do the following: Have a PC app written in C# that has the path to MAME's hi folder. Every x amount of seconds it would get a directory listing of the hi folder and (perhaps only if the CRC or date stamp of the file has changed) pass it into HiToText which is a program that decodes hi files to extract the actual hiscore data and outputs it to stdout. In the PC app you can simply capture the text directly from stdout and then formulate a packet to send to the iOS application via UDP. Once the iOS app receives the packet it will take the data and format it for display based on the number of columns (which is determined by the '|' pipe character).

HiToText is an absolute must whichever way you decide to write it because it's the only project around that has taken the time to decypher the hi files to extract the actual hiscore data. I actually wrote much of the foundation code for this program.